Making and Reshaping Musical Instruments — Following the trends of musical instrument inventions.

Tag: invention

Ever since The Outliers where Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert, we’ve been looking at electronic instruments that repurpose existing paths to virtuosity. To reach that 10,000 hours – an instrument requires a progression from which to travel from novice to master. Learning curves with existing teachers and learning materials come with a track record of success. The recorder fits the bill. It already has tons of books, videos and teachers. But, the eCorder takes it to a whole new level

On top of the recorder interface, Michael Shonle and his team has built a synthesizer based on Physical Modeling (PM) principles combined with subtractive synthesis. All the nuance of tone and voice control is used to drive a PM synth, which is then combined with some wicked resonant filters and DSP goodness. Or take advantage of its has MIDI and CV output, and use it to rock out on existing synthesizers.

The Kyub kickstarter is the cutting edge blueprint for manufacturing musical instruments.

Presellling and Idea Validation

By using kickstarter, the Kyub team is able to see if there is a market for their product. The Kyub is a way cool esoteric MIDI controller, that is beloved by a small group of people. Kickstarter allows the team to test the viability of the product before making more devices, and assembling additional product support resources.

Everybody must visit the sculptures at MIT Museum. I go once a year to reconnect with the work of Arthur Ganson. New ideas are born. This is one of the sculptors / inventors / artists who inspired this site to exist. There is an exhibit called 5000 Moving Parts which brings more kinetic sculptures to Cambridge. Go see it!

Moving beyond the Magnetic Resonator Piano, Andrew Macpherson joined a team to make Touchkeys, a kickstarter project that brings multi-touch add-on to keyboard controllers. Touchkeys allows every key on a MIDI controller to have individual X-Y location mapped on the keys. Keyboardists will instantly become more expressive and creative with this add on. Here at Shapchanginginstruments.com, we think this will be a historic project.